Exceptional Student Work: 'O Say, Nudge that Far-Stangled Pammer Yet Wave?'

In which a student named Paul surprises me again and again

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Have I ever had a student as original and peculiar as Paul Z.? Perhaps, but never before, I don’t think, have I had one who could as consistently deliver confounding, high-quality, and bizarre approaches to my assignments.

I am lucky enough to have this young man as a student for a second consecutive quarter—that is, if he doesn’t tire of my tricks and drop the class!

A sophomore slump is inevitable, or is it? In any case, while I still have your attention, here’s an essay of his from winter quarter. Email me with your favorite line. I bet I get a lot of different answers.

O Say, Nudge that Far-Stangled Pammer Yet Wave?

By Paul Z.

Today I went to a salon thing. My girlfriend is part of the history honors society at UCLA, which is called PAT; the salon was one of their new ideas for events. The idea is that you get a bunch of people together, and like in an old-timey Ottoman cafe, they debate their ideas about society and politics.

My girlfriend is a board member on PAT, so she had to go. I like spending time with her, so I tagged along like her attendant tumor. We got there, a stuffy little discussion room where most of the other people were board members, and my girlfriend passed out some doughnuts she had brought. They were a little beat up from banging around in their box when we ran to catch the bus earlier.

Another board member of PAT led the discussion. His name was Dan. He had been high at the last PAT event, which had been a professor talk. As a result, he had been a little “mansplainy,” in the words of my girlfriend. Dan’s chill; in another event I had tagged along to, he passed out homemade cinnamon rolls, which were really good. Sweet glaze delicate coated fluffy, cinnamony bread; the rolls had a chewy, crispy caramel crust at their base. Halfway through that event, Dan had briefly left us to smoke a joint on the roof of the building we were in.

Dan started us off with a question of something something is the United States becoming more fascist? Nearly everybody agreed: yes, the United States is sliding into facism. Dan then said, ok, let’s establish a baseline definition for what facism is. There was one guy, lets call him Dave, who was the most vocal throughout the time I was there, who suggested that fascism is when groups are scapegoated. He brought up something about everybody hating billionaires, or something about a lot of people hating immigrants. Dan didn’t like that. He thought that what Dave had proposed was something different, something which I don’t remember, but they had a very lively back-and-forth. All the while, Dave played with his hands, knotting and braiding his ever-so-slightly-trembling knuckles. He was hunched forwards. His affect emanated from him like the smell of fermented meat; it’s that feeling when you answer a professor’s question, and you’re left lightheaded and rapidly repeating what happened in your head to ascertain whether you were cringe or not. Other explanations of what fascism’s definition were raised; something about the U.S. becoming more authoritarian, and something about how January 6th was like the Beer Hall Putsch in Nazi Germany.

I know that fascism is bad and Hitler-y and that’s usually good enough for everyday life, but there were a lot of fancy words being thrown around so I Googled it. According to Wikipedia, facism is a “far-right, authoritarian and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism…” etc, etc. I felt like that was pretty unhelpful; ok, you gave me a bunch of characteristics, but I still don’t know what facism is. Whatever the case, I didn’t really participate much in the conversation. I was there mostly because my girlfriend was; I was working on a reading journal thing for another English class, which took up most of my attention. The majority of my speech was with my girlfriend in Russian (we both speak Russian) about stuff like, oh, do you want to go at 6:30 instead of 7:00? To be honest, I’m not sure I spoke a single word of English there.

But I do see facism slowly leaching into our government. I thought about it after my girlfriend and I left the salon; my personal answer is that facism is the state requisition of corporate entities to further political and ideological goals. So like how Elon Musk bought Twitter, used it to spout a bunch of MAGA revanchist I hate gender pronouns stuff, and now continues to do so while dismantling the federal government. Or like how a bunch of billionaire tech-bros showed up in the front row at Trump’s inauguration, and now they’re all ending their DEI initiatives. Or like how Google’s relabeled the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

It’s almost without question that the salon centered around a discussion of fascism as a result of Trump’s reelection. What’s a little disconcerting is that we all kind of wanted, if not his policy goals, greater implementation of the methods he uses to achieve them. The pressure has been building for a while to reign in corporations; people agree that we’re being taken advantage of. We want the executive to do stuff; to solve all of our problems and “fix” what feels like a deeply damaged nation. We want someone who is strong. Trump perfectly gives off that vibe As my stock investments have indicated, companies quiver at his every word and their CEOs line up to lick Trump’s shoes. As much as the 2024 election was a question of policy, it was a question of aura. Could anyone else have transformed tech company CEOs into simpering dogs like Trump? Trump could shoot a guy in the middle of a New York street and not lose a single vote; could Harris?

I’m 21. I feel like I’m graduating into an America that’s just starting to turn overripe. I want more affordable housing prices, so I can rent a place with my girlfriend. I want a better healthcare system, so that I’m not shit out of luck if my appendix explodes. I want to be able to afford fresh food, and I want functional public transportation, and I want something to be done for the unhoused people who are ever-present in LA. Why in the world do we have these problems in the first place, and why in the world do we have so many of them? On paper, we are not just one of the richest nations on Earth, but one of the most affluent societies in human history. We once landed men on the moon, and eliminated smallpox, and now, we can’t get the Culver City 6 to run on time? I hate that bus!! OK, maybe the invisible hand of the free market has simply determined that it’s not efficient to provide services for the unhoused, but there’s certain things that we as a society are morally obligated to do, be they efficient or not. It’s weird; under my own definition, I am a fascist. I want someone to reign these corporations in and force them to work for our societal benefit instead of their own profits. I just have a different understanding of societal benefit than the people currently in power.

People are in agreement that there’s dry rot slowly eating away at our society. People want someone to reign big [insert industry of choice] in. Facism is not an ideology that takes a society over, but an epiphenomenon arising from a society’s involution. Trump’s frantic, thrashing gestures are the death spasms of an America declining in vitality; our recent facism is the momentary period of lucidity the elderly exhibit before they pass.

Which is why PAT had to contrive such a thing as a salon in the first place. Such a gathering simply could not exist in nature but as a club event with the forced attendance of its board; people simply don’t care about politics insofar as they relate to policy. Everybody senses that the life spirit that enervated America for nearly 250 years is fading away; the only point of contention is whether America’s slow death is characterized by inescapable student debt or immigrants taking our jobs. Political discourse only happens in order to provide tribes for people to build an identity. At the end of the day, that spirit has gone, and everyone feels it. In the hour-ish that I was at the salon, Dan and Dave spoke the most, both dictating their opinions to each other. It was like I was in a lecture. Dan spoke searchingly of some true definition of fascism, practically begging us to affirm whatever he had in mind. Dave rumbled about immigration and scapegoating amidst jerky movements, caught up in the shock that not everyone agreed with him. I thought that everyone was wrong and everything was stupid, which aroused my instinct to avoid interaction with anyone I didn’t agree with by walking away. People were there to reinforce their identity’s salience, and to win

I think that the United States is becoming more fascist in that companies are commanded to do the government’s dirty work, and that it's the natural effect rather than cause of our society’s ills. I also came up with that opinion to convince both you and myself that I am smarter than Dan and Dave, and to use the word “epiphenomenon”. The way the discussion was unfolding, I got the vibe that Dan and Dave formed an opinion similarly, and were looking more for agreement than discourse. In any case, we were all 20-something year olds at a liberal university attending an event hosted by a history honors society. What opinions of our own did we even have, and amongst those few actual opinions we held, what differences could be found amongst them? Fundamentally, we were there because we all felt that something intangible had been extinguished, and we thought that we could look really good to other people articulating ourselves in regards to that feeling.

The sun is setting on the great American Empire. I don’t know what will happen next to my beloved nation and frankly I’ve kind of given up, so I’m grinding Duolingo for Chinese and Russian (one of them has to win out, right?). In the warmth of its dying embers, I count the small victories where I am someone momentarily.